Monday, August 07, 2017

This has been a very difficult few days. I wanted to provide an update on the memo that was circulated over this past week.

First, let me say that we strongly support the right of Googlers to express themselves, and much of what was in that memo is fair to debate, regardless of whether a vast majority of Googlers disagree with it. However, portions of the memo violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace. Our job is to build great products for users that make a difference in their lives. To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK. It is contrary to our basic values and our Code of Conduct, which expects “each Googler to do their utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias and unlawful discrimination.”

The memo has clearly impacted our co-workers, some of whom are hurting and feel judged based on their gender. Our co-workers shouldn’t have to worry that each time they open their mouths to speak in a meeting, they have to prove that they are not like the memo states, being “agreeable” rather than “assertive,” showing a “lower stress tolerance,” or being “neurotic.”

At the same time, there are co-workers who are questioning whether they can safely express their views in the workplace (especially those with a minority viewpoint). They too feel under threat, and that is also not OK. People must feel free to express dissent. So to be clear again, many points raised in the memo — such as the portions criticizing Google’s trainings, questioning the role of ideology in the workplace, and debating whether programs for women and underserved groups are sufficiently open to all — are important topics. The author had a right to express their views on those topics — we encourage an environment in which people can do this and it remains our policy to not take action against anyone for prompting these discussions.

The past few days have been very difficult for many at the company, and we need to find a way to debate issues on which we might disagree — while doing so in line with our Code of Conduct. I’d encourage each of you to make an effort over the coming days to reach out to those who might have different perspectives from your own. I will be doing the same.

I have been on work related travel in Africa and Europe the past couple of weeks and had just started my family vacation here this week. I have decided to return tomorrow as clearly there’s a lot more to discuss as a group — including how we create a more inclusive environment for all.

So please join me, along with members of the leadership team at a town hall on Thursday. Check your calendar soon for details.

— Sundar

Translation: you can go ahead and fire him, because Code of Conduct, but we've got a problem here and we really need to figure out how to keep the whackjobs from getting completely out of hand.

133 Comments:

The memo has clearly impacted our co-workers, some of whom are hurting and feel judged based on their gender. Our co-workers shouldn’t have to worry that each time they open their mouths to speak in a meeting, they have to prove that they are not like the memo states, being “agreeable” rather than “assertive,” showing a “lower stress tolerance,” or being “neurotic.”

The memo has proven effective. Hold a mirror up to a SJW, and they despise what they see, becoming self-conscious when in "polite" company and shrieking like banshees where they can get away with doing so.

Memegender: I bet it is a portmanteau of meme and engender. As in, "Let's get together in a board room and create some memes which will engender the required thoughts and feelz in our (various) targets"

That aside, I think more likely that memegender is an internal Google codeword, and we will only find out what it means if a Googler looks it up in their internal Google codebook and shares.

Having lived through other purges, I translate his email as "I'm returning early. Reach out to all your neighbors to identify the heretics. The purge starts tomorrow. We WILL be diverse!" Pichai is going to go full SJW.

"Sundar" sounds too much like my favorite cartoon Thundarr the Barbarian and I'm feeling very triggered and hurt by the conflation of an awesome 80s animated icon with a Bengali SJW corporate hack. I think I need take time off of work (paid of course) because of this, until I feel sufficiently safe and special again.

But the CEO's letter is well done, high quality damage control. Basically, it says "Ok, we'll fre this one but he moved the Overton window". I think that some "moderates" in GOOG perfectly understand that anti-right wing bias may not fly well with an important part of their audience

IMHO this is the beginning. It will end don in victorious flames when a conservative judge allows billions of dollars of punitive damage in a class action by discriminated right-wingers.

Getting such a verdict to happen and be enforced is one of the next victories that should be sought (and reached) by the Alt-Riht in the 10 years to come. I am sure some Texas juridictions are waiting for a juicy liberal target to appear in their crosshairs, and advenge Abigail Fischer

To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK. It is contrary to our basic values and our Code of Conduct, which expects “each Googler to do their utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias and unlawful discrimination.

If too many people sacrifice themselves to fight this purge, the media will just ghost the entire proceeding. They have already lied to the public about the content of the manifesto to cover Google, which means they will double down to show SJW solidarity rather than backstab the business model that will replace them. Good to know.

anti-right wing bias may not fly well with an important part of their audience

It's not their audience they're worried about, it's the 1/3 of their employees who said the guy had a point. And those are just the ones willing to say so on an "anonymous" poll.

Those are overwhelmingly the people who actually make things work at Google. The freaking VP of Diversity and Snacks isn't going to write the code for the next upgrade to their search algorithm. They've filled 2/3 of their workforce with people who are there to get paid and do social engineering, or just get paid. None of that 2/3 can actually create anything except trouble. Some of the higher-ups are surely smart enough to know that, though it won't keep them from doubling-down and starting a slow exodus of the capable.

Yes, it appears so and that is good news. @JohnRobb is on the #GoogleManifesto thread looking at it with his perspective of systems disruption (He even links to vox popoli--but I am not sure in what spirit he does so, could be supportive, could be antagonistic...Robb is smart, but I think his instincts/sympathies lie with the left). If he misses how easy and important it will be to disrupt these things that the Deep State depends on (I am looking at you Facebook/Zuckerberg) then I will be surprised.

Think about it though, many of the STEM guys at Google own stock options and are multimillionaires. Not such a bad problem for people who joined Google when it was mainly White and Asian males, and has changed in a very short period into hate-filled, diverse (and sometimes vibrant) culture looking for any reason to destroy thhem.

If I were a Google employee, I'd be looking to get the hell out of dodge right now, especially now that multiple managers have come out of the woodwork to gloat about how they spy on employees and go out of their way to hold back the careers of even the best and the brightest if they happen to be to the right of Stalin.

Sundar Pikachu: Pepe and frogs everywhere thank you for your valiant stand against biology, the science of hate. Trans-species discrimination is wrong, and we are glad to see that Google is firmly against it. Our canine and bovine comrades also thank you. Feels good, man.

He's winging home from virtue signaling in Gambia with the fam to make sure the heretics are burned and he stays faux in charge. Google stayed steady in after hours. Let's see how it opens.

They've filled 2/3 of their workforce with people who are there to get paid and do social engineering, or just get paid. None of that 2/3 can actually create anything except trouble. Some of the higher-ups are surely smart enough to know that, though it won't keep them from doubling-down and starting a slow exodus of the capable.

This, though I'm betting on doubling down and a fast exodus.

If he misses how easy and important it will be to disrupt these things that the Deep State depends on (I am looking at you Facebook/Zuckerberg) then I will be surprised.

This note has the same tone as an elementary school teacher calming a distraught six year old. Sounds like Google has already gone way off the rails, which seems to have inspired the memo in the first place.

This may be one of those rare cases where another injection of hardcore dialectic could do some good. The rift within Google is between the dialectic minds and the rhetorical, with the dialectics creating the value.

People must feel free to express dissent...The author had a right to express their views — we encourage an environment in which people can do this and it remains our policy to not take action against anyone for prompting these discussions...I’d encourage each of you to make an effort over the coming days to reach out to those who might have different perspectives from your own."

Yeah, the first thing I would want to do is sit down and discuss my right-wing views, after all the hypomanic hissy fits, and the threats. And the firing.

By the way, he did not break the code of conduct--I've read it. They use language in there that says you can't harass or threaten anyone. If you say something that someone take offense to, then they define that as harassment and threats.

I live mile from Google and work in tech - y'all have no idea how strongly SJWs rule here. But they are fragile. Give pressure and they will break. If the west is to survive, we need to destroy Judeo tech and it's diversity pets.

"Sundar had a big part in creating the tiger. He exploited his identity as an immigrant to gain allies. He would not be CEO if he were a white male."

He exploited his own identity, yes, but he's being explioted as well. South Asians are also some of if not the most willing bribe takers in the world. And it seems they actually enjoy committing acts of extreme corruption. Don't think that silicon valley (or the DNC) is unaware of this and is only hiring Indians/Pakis for cheap labor and diversity quotas.

Now that these companies are all wrapped up with the gov, and constantly riding on the edge of legality, it makes sense to have Indians in good positions to break laws and whatever else is needed.

"}Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system. "

People do KNOW, as it is exactly the same at all national and international banks, and financial institutions. In fact, they are the ones who make sure Tech is converged, as they wanted it that way from the start. Google had to please the finance companies first, as they are their backers, and the ones who keep monies flowing in so fast that start ups cannot keep up.

When the finance companies are disrupted, the converged tech companies will be too.

#36 is right, killer blog._ _ _ _ _ _ _I was at Gab, saw a link to a Stefan M video. Was watching it, noticed links on the side to videos about Custer's last stand. Went and watched two of those; second one had lots of sound effects, arrows finding their mark, guns fired, whooping, ominous music. Went back to the gab tab, saw posts about the Google guy getting fired. Thought to myself, hmmm, will go to VP and see Google's last stand.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/google-fires-employee-behind-controversial-diversity-memo...The subject of Google’s ideological bent came up at the most recent shareholder meeting, in June. A shareholder asked executives whether conservatives would feel welcome at the company. Executives disagreed with the idea that anyone wouldn’t.

“The company was founded under the principles of freedom of expression, diversity, inclusiveness and science-based thinking,” Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt said at the time....

Just had an idea for a remake of Donnie Brasco. Based guy goes undercover and takes a job at a major corporation in order to further promote the SJW madness and bring the company down. But he's so good at it that he keeps getting promoted every time he writes a memo about how the company needs to do MORE to promote diversity and inclusion. Soon he's senior VP, promoted over the guy (Lefty) who initially took him under his wing.

His wife and friends don't recognize him anymore. His wife says something about wanting to send their kids to a good school, and he responds by telling her that "good school" is just racist dog whistling.

Those are overwhelmingly the people who actually make things work at Google. The freaking VP of Diversity and Snacks isn't going to write the code for the next upgrade to their search algorithm. They've filled 2/3 of their workforce with people who are there to get paid and do social engineering, or just get paid. None of that 2/3 can actually create anything except trouble. Some of the higher-ups are surely smart enough to know that, though it won't keep them from doubling-down and starting a slow exodus of the capable.

This is essentially it. All of Google is kept afloat by one thing only. Adwords. They have no other significant source of income after a decade or more of trying to diversify. Every other business is borderline trivial when compared to AdWords. All the moonshots have failed. All the R&D has failed. It's. All. AdWords.

And at the same time, AdWords is in an insane breakneck against scammers, spammers, and those trying to get an edge, plus competition who fiercely wants those pennies times billions of clicks back.

The money making core of Google is a tiny speck of it's workforce, a tiny core of people who make AdWords work. The fear is not that 2/3 are SJWs, it's that one or two of three of the key engineers, who are working on the next version of Search and Adwords, who are actively fighting and hardening against existential threats to the product, might walk or even just do a slightly less great job.

Google is actually a very fragile company. They are ripe for disruption from a new player, or alternatively, to be drained from a few deep pocketed rivals. The entire bubble of online advertising stems from a belief that is often irrational that online advertising is effective at certain definitions of cost effectiveness. Sundar knows

@23 Those who strongly agreed with the memo outnumbered those who strongly disagreed by almost 3:1. The problem, historically, has been that the SJWs are the ones who raise hell when they don't get their way while the majority toils silently to repair the damage done by the SJWs.

The majority needs to get a clue and start mercilessly ostracizing anyone who reeks of SJW.

Of course he does. He's a high-caste Brahmin from punjabistan. He's been his whole life to think genetics matter.

And dc is right. Google is highly fragile. Their entire income stream is based on a dying, chaotic market - advertising. They are a creature of the funny-money cycle and will outlive the current monetary regime by less than a year.

Noah B The Savage Gardener wrote:The problem, historically, has been that the SJWs are the ones who raise hell when they don't get their way while the majority toils silently to repair the damage done by the SJWs.As Kathy Shaidle is wont to say "Not showing up to riot is a failed strategy for the right."

Advertising revenue is highly cyclical too. If you think the corporate culture is toxic now, wait until the next downturn hits.

I've wondered about this. During the last downturn, Google was still growing quickly because of international expansion and the novelty. They are now mature. New growth takes a while. Cost per click continues to fall quarter after quarter, increasing the treadmill of sales volume required.

Investors are inceasingly cranky about the waste on moonshots and out of focus. The re-org to Alphabet bought some time, as the primary business unit - Google - remains healthy.

However, as you say, a turn for the worse might end up sweeping away thousands of these SJW losers who are essentially grifting in a small and short time period.

In other words.....how can the Liberal SJWs at Google coexist with the more radical militant Leftist neurotics, without coming to blows. Is it possible for civil persons to merely be supportive and open without triggering the Leftist rads, because they are not assertive enough? Since the Far Left would ONLY be caught dead in the same room with Alt-Right, they need to practice attacking somebody....and the SJWs have submitted to the lash for everyone else, so why not for the depraved? They have needs too.

When you think facts are problematic, it's not the facts that are problematic. When the high-IQ rock-stars see the writing on the walls and the Pareto's Law reality (often called the 80/20 rule, variously also represented at the square root of the employees do 50% of the work, meaning, root(75000)= 274) hits and they lose 300 people and half their productivity walks away with them, it's going to be ugly.

He wrote carefully, but it was received as heresy, misunderstood, misrepresented, made the fragile freak and prove exactly what he was saying was correct. he was fired, meaning that you are NOT allowed to speak freely, and the most easily offended are driving the chariot.

Can you imagine what would happen if someplace like Gab picked him up, he loved it, and sent an email back to his supporters telling them about the wonders of life outside Si Valley?

My, what a racist and white supremacist country Canada is showing itself to be. They should happily welcome in the third-worlders by the 10s of millions. Even better, they should tax their white citizens to pay for the living and out of control breeding of the invaders. Welcome your own soft genocide with a coke and a smile! Anything less makes them Literally Hitler™.

"As a group, scientific study shows that women tend to neurotic, and our systems at Google should be cognicent of that, though it goes without saying that individual employees may or may not display that tendency..."Google SJWs: neurotic screeching

or

Google SJWs:"This memo is a disgusting screed which pejoratively labels entire groups with negative stereotypes, which is NEVER OK. How typical of the white male.

CNBC actually ran an article saying the firing was probably illegal based on Federal and California laws. Instapundit has a link to it. I wouldn't settle unless I got eight figures, a public apology by the CEO without the word OK in it, and a required few changes at Google.

O/T, but Die-versity related. I watched the Dark Tower movie earlier tonight- 7 novels I fondly remember reading 10 years ago...with many rumors of movie adoptions since...crammed into one gelded 95-minute Disneyish film where the kid knows better than the adults. The cucked substitution of Idris Elba for the iconic blue-eyed gunslinger Roland Deschain is old news, but all I could do was laugh through my disappointment at the discovery that they also cast the Allstate commercial guy as his father YET STILL kept the story detail that they are the last royal descendants of Arthur Eld (King Arthur). Mary Beard must be smiling.

Even had an actor explaining to the audience that the Gunslinger's six-shooters were forged from Excalibur. WE WUZ KANGZ!

Let's see if Google is still blocking my comments on Blogger. The thread over on Hacker News has blown up, in 4 short hours it is at 1200 comments. Haven't seen that much heat and energy over there... well, ever. Feels like that hot summer when the Newark riots happened.

Supposedly the first vibrators were created to spare doctors from getting cramps from digitally pacifying hysterical women. Still waiting for the revisionist history of how Victorian nurses were expected to give handjobs for male mental health....or how they invented anything with more than two moving parts.

dh wrote:Google is actually a very fragile company. They are ripe for disruption from a new player, or alternatively, to be drained from a few deep pocketed rivals. The entire bubble of online advertising stems from a belief that is often irrational that online advertising is effective at certain definitions of cost effectiveness. Sundar knows

dh gets to the bottom of it.

Google, like most dotcom companies of the era, had one good idea: ranking search results to sift the chaff from the wheat. The quality of Google search results were such that google became a verb. From that tiny seed a great company grew.

But the Internet of the mid 1990s is not the Internet of today. Google isn't culling misleading results from search queries--they're curating the Internet. They are a gigantic cache of Instagram photos, IMDB listings, Wikipedia entries, and StackExchange answers. They have to pay for hosting that cache in some way, and that is why Google is an advertising company with a lot of computers.

Let us all grant that Google used their success for many good things. Google Earth is pretty neat. Google Maps can be indispensable. Even their original good idea, the search engine, is handy when you're trying to remember something you read some time ago but you don't recall where.

That's a service paid for by tracking you, the Google user, whenever they can, and selling that information to random strangers, with the gaps filled in by Wall Street financiers' reindeer games on EBITDA.

(There's an argument that Google's commitment to diversity means they can index sites/serve ads to cultures who cannot fully communicate in 7-bit ASCII. My suggestion is that they should re-home their HQ in Qatar, if that's all that awesome.)

"Even their original good idea, the search engine, is handy when you're trying to remember something you read some time ago but you don't recall where"

Not anymore.Any searches relating to anything political (and thanks to these insufferable nitwits, everything is political) results in curated goodthink pages displaying the official narrative rather than actual information.

About the only thing that still works is the use of google image search to find higher resolutions of cool images.

Bing used to be an embarrassing copy of google, now it is superior whenever I use it.

This thread started by string theorist turned software engineer (and former Google big brain) (((Yonatan Zunger))) is worth reading--for anyone who wonders how anyone can make the argument that diversity is actually the most important factor in the technology field.

I was wondering if Google could get bought out by an alt-right coalition (Thiel, et al) but I looked up their valuation. $645 billion. That's comparable to the GDP of Switzerland or Saudi Arabia. For a search engine company (or whatever else they do)? Insane valuation.

@97-Of course, they don't characterize doctors sexually servicing women and orgasming them to sanity as any sort of coup on the women's part. It's all about what poor/inattentive lovers their husbands were, how they failed them where it counted. Kinda exactly like steppin' out and female-initiated divorce nowadays.

Yeah valuation is constantly shifting and I would expect the google bubble to burst in the not too distant future. But three-quarters of a trillion dollars is simply insane. It's right in between Apple and Microsoft, but they actually *make* something.

I think it's overpriced by about 90%. Shorts could make a ton of money driving this thing into the ground (but watch out for that dead cat bounce.)

Perfunctory Quotidian wrote:Yeah valuation is constantly shifting and I would expect the google bubble to burst in the not too distant future. But three-quarters of a trillion dollars is simply insane. It's right in between Apple and Microsoft, but they actually *make* something.

I think it's overpriced by about 90%. Shorts could make a ton of money driving this thing into the ground (but watch out for that dead cat bounce.)

I wish you luck, it is hard to time and the interest they charge the average joe schmo on a short position make it hard to ride the short very long and still come out ahead unless it's an absolutely catastrophic crash all at once. If the company happens to pay out dividends while you are short you have to pay those as well.

The stock market is heavily manipulated by the Fed/BOJ/SNB, and they would have the balls of any short sellers hanging on the wall well before any could ever hope to profit (they have quite a collection of short seller's smalls already).

Even when GOOG does enter into a death plunge, they'll just halt trading so the big boys can get their money out, and then the regular stock- and bondholders eat the loss when they let it drop to zero (like they did with GM, AIG, etc.)

Smarter play would be to gut the company's most valuable assets, i.e. the team that works the profit-centres. A good way to accomplish that would be to write a polite yet firm manifesto which speaks the language of competent people, and triggers the incompetent. Points for doing it publicly, so they cannot pretend it's not happening.

> They are ripe for disruption from a new player, or alternatively, to be drained from a few deep pocketed rivals.

Any company that wanted to replicate their process could simply hire away the majority of the Adwords team and move them to a location where law suits weren't a reasonable option. It would take a lot of money to do so, but...

> However, as you say, a turn for the worse might end up sweeping away thousands of these SJW losers who are essentially grifting in a small and short time period.

Given the percentage of SJW's and management's willingness to tolerate them, I wouldn't bet on that outcome. It's what competent management would do, but what in this affair has demonstrated any degree of competence on the part of management?

> Maybe English isn't the CEO's first language?

Pichai Sundararajan? What was your first clue?

> It's right in between Apple and Microsoft, but they actually *make* something.

Apple does. Microsoft only "makes" a handful of products, and of them only XBox is a significant contributor to their income stream. I'm not even sure it makes money, but I'd have to check their current annual report to be sure. They're in almost exactly the same market position as Google. They're absolutely dependent on Microsoft Office as their cash cow.

> Shorts could make a ton of money driving this thing into the ground.

“The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”

I'd think that a far better bet would be to buy short options or sell long options. But I'm not an options trader and can't make any recommendations in that regard. Options are not an arena I wish to play in. As the noted philosopher Harry Callahan once said "A man's got to know his limitations."

'our Code of Conduct, which expects “each Googler to do their utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias and unlawful discrimination.”'

Am I the only one that finds it ironic that hiring SJW's as the primary beneficiary of your employment practices creates the very environment you claim you are protecting your employees from? This is the same as saying "Hate is evil. But, its OK to hate the haters!"

I have to be honest, despite my own agreement with all of the sentiments expressed by Damore, the comments about biological differences gave the employer grounds for termination. For example, I feel the negro employees at my company provide piss poor service, but it would be insane for me to write up a memo on this outlining the reasons we all know too well. But I think the larger point here may be that Damore was expecting to get publicity and ultimately fired for this memo. The Left and Media got played again running down this rabbit hole. This will ultimately hurt Google and the SJW narrative and they fell right into the trap AGAIN.

The reason Android doesn't have the same kind of ecosystem of pluggable software components as the other Linux distributions is that it doesn't have the same kind of package management as the other Linux distributions. If someone could give Android a package manager and better development tools, people could start arguing about lower level components than the apps, and it won't matter that some phones are locked to a particular kernel version chosen by the manufacturer because userland has a well defined interface to the kernel.

Frank Gappa wrote:despite my own agreement with all of the sentiments expressed by Damore, the comments about biological differences gave the employer grounds for termination.False.did you actually read what he said, because it was basically "There are non-bias related reasons that there are fewer qualifed women candidates for some positions, and Google should stop discriminating against whites and men in hiring and promotion."He very clearly, explicitly and intentionally did NOT say that women were less suited for technical work. He said they were less attracted to it, which is obviously true.